In addition to the starred review from Publishers Weekly, two more fantastic, non-spoiler reviews of Freedom of the Mask were posted this week.

NetGalley reviewer Chris concludes:

“5 stars. The type of book that is the reason we love stories. Imagination too large for a movie can only exist in books like this. Adventure just doesn’t get any better.”

NetGalley user Chris McCaffrey: Freedom of the Mask

And Elitist Book Reviews concludes:

“FREEDOM OF THE MASK has every bit the adventure of the prior two novels, but also manages to incorporate more of the historical details and stylings of the first few novels. It is, simply put, an incredible novel.”

Elitist Book Reviews: Freedom of the Mask

Subterranean Press is shipping the trade edition of Freedom of the Mask now. You can order a copy from their website. Lettered and limited editions are still pre-orderable, too. (They will ship once the traycases and slipcases are completed.)

The audiobook and ebook editions will be released on Tuesday, May 31.

Pre-order the audiobook from Audible
Pre-order the ebook for Kindle, NOOK, and Kobo

Freedom of the Mask by Robert McCammonWe’re pleased to announce that the TRADE hardcover of Robert McCammon’s Freedom of the Mask is in stock and shipping. (If you ordered the limited or lettered editions, please be patient. Those will be along in due course.)

Freedom may just be the most exciting of the Matthew Corbett novels yet, garnering a starred review from Publishers Weekly:

McCammon’s rousing sixth yarn featuring Matthew Corbett (after 2014’s The River of Souls) transports the early 18th-century American problem solver across the Atlantic to London, where he’s clapped into hellish Newgate Prison on murder charges. Matthew quickly becomes embroiled in mysteries involving fellow inmate Daniel Defoe; a gin-running street gang, the Black-Eyed Broodies; a kidnapped Italian opera singer; and a masked avenger named Albion, whose exploits are sensationalized (along with Matthew’s) in a penny dreadful broadsheet, the Pin

Want to read more, including an excerpt from the novel, and an interview with the author? Check out the book’s product page.

The ebook and audiobook editions will be available no later than May 31. Both can be pre-ordered now

Pre-order the audiobook from Audible
Pre-order the ebook for Kindle, NOOK, Kobo

From Subterranean Press:

Robert McCammon’s Freedom of the Mask page is burgeoning with features. In addition to the standard description, there’s a interview with the author, an excerpt from the novel, and now, a cutting from the starred review the novel just received from Publishers Weekly:

McCammon’s rousing sixth yarn featuring Matthew Corbett (after 2014’s The River of Souls) transports the early 18th-century American problem solver across the Atlantic to London, where he’s clapped into hellish Newgate Prison on murder charges. Matthew quickly becomes embroiled in mysteries involving fellow inmate Daniel Defoe; a gin-running street gang, the Black-Eyed Broodies; a kidnapped Italian opera singer; and a masked avenger named Albion, whose exploits are sensationalized (along with Matthew’s) in a penny dreadful broadsheet, the Pin…

The full review can be read on the Publishers Weekly website.

Freedom of the Mask will also be available in ebook formats in the U.S.

Audible will release an audiobook edition—again narrated by Edoardo Ballerini—in May, too.

German publisher Luzifer has acquired the rights to publish a German translation of Speaks the Nightbird, the first book in Robert McCammon’s Matthew Corbett series. I’ll post more details as I get them.

Translations of Speaks the Nightbird have been previously published in Japan, Russia, Korea, and France.

German readers can also look forward to the two-volume German translation of The Wolf’s Hour that will be published this summer.

Subterranean Press posted this today:

Over at the Freedom of the Mask product page, we’ve posted a brand new interview with Robert McCammon, and an excerpt from the novel.

To get you started, here’s one of the questions from the interview:

GB: Getting such a note-perfect glimpse of 1700s America is one of the highlights of the series, and this new volume stays in fine form despite the move in scenery. Did you have to do a lot of research on England in this period or was it already something you were a buff about? Any surprising tidbits from your research?

RM: I had already done a lot of research on London and was saving it up for this book. Also I’ve had the idea of the hidden village in Wales for a long time. Nothing really surprised me about my research except to realize how really crazed, blood-thirsty and wicked that city was during the time period I’m writing about…what there was of the law had its hands full and mostly stayed out of the way. Oh, and I couldn’t really describe the full reality of Newgate Prison because no modern reader would believe it…the prisoners had a bar in there and had their liquor brought in…at the same time prisoners were killing each other over pairs of shoes and the guards were being paid by the inmates…it was crazy!

As a reminder, the signed limited edition and lettered edition contain a new bonus 22,000 word novella available nowhere else, as well as color plates by Vincent Chong.

Click here to read more or place your order.

Freedom of the Mask will be published in May 2016. Ebook and audiobook editions will also be published then.

Subterranean Press reports:

Robert McCammon’s new Matthew Corbett thriller, Freedom of the Mask, has just been sent to the printer, which puts the trade edition right on schedule for a May release. We still have a good supply of all editions available for preorder, though these novels have a history of going out of print quickly after publication.

About the Book:

The year is 1703, and Matthew Corbett, professional “problem solver,” is missing. Last seen by his friends in New York before he departed on a lucrative, seemingly straightforward mission for the Herrald Agency in Charles Town, he’s been too long absent. His comrade-in-arms Hudson Greathouse has an increasing sense the young friend he thinks of as a son must have met with some unexpected peril. Following his hunch, Greathouse retraces Matthew’s steps only to find him first presumed dead, then accused of murdering a young woman and apparently en route to London with a devious Prussian count last encountered on Professor Fell’s Pendulum Island.

Little does he know that Matthews’s circumstances are growing worse by the second. For when Matthew arrives in the bustling squalor of Londontown, he’s come shackled, charged for the murder of Count Anton Mannerheim Dahlgren. No matter the lack of body, presumed lost to the ocean. He soon finds himself locked up in the infamous Newgate prison, and has drawn the interest of a mysterious mask-wearing vigilante accused of several gruesome murders. Greathouse and the woman Matthew loves, Berry Grigsby, travel across the high seas to England to aid their friend, but it is impossible to know whether they will reach him in time to save his life.

Freedom of the Mask is the sixth installment in bestselling author Robert McCammon’s acclaimed series of standalone historical thrillers featuring the exploits of a young hero the USA Character Approved Blog has called “the Early American James Bond.” The most surprising and ambitious volume to date, this is a novel filled with unpredictable twists and a note-perfect depiction of early 1700s London. Fans will not want to miss Matthew Corbett’s most dangerous adventure yet.

The Limited Edition will contain an exclusive bonus novella—over 22,000 words long—featuring Hudson Greathouse’s visit to “The House at the Edge of the World.”

Click here to read more or place your order.

Subterranean Press has created “ebook bundles” for several of their authors, providing two ebooks for $9.99, which is less than buying the individual books at regular price. You can read more about the bundles on the Subterranean Press website.

There are three Robert McCammon ebook bundles currently available:

Clicking on the images below will also take you to the Subterranean Press product pages for the bundles.

 

Vampire_Classics_by_Robert_McCammon_Large Matthew_Corbett_Bundle_Number_One_by_Robert_McCammon rm-horror-classic

 

Artist Vincent Chong posted these illustrations from the Subterranean Press limited edition of The Queen of Bedlam on his blog this morning. The Queen of Bedlam is available as a signed, slipcased, limited edition from Subterranean Press. It can be purchased here.

The Queen of Bedlam is book two in the Matthew Corbett series, which started with Speaks the Nightbird. You can read more about the books on this site and on MatthewCorbettsWorld.com.

Click on the images to view larger versions of each.

Hello, all. I finished The Border about a month ago, but I wanted to wait to announce that until the book was out on the marketplace. I think it’s pretty good, and it’s certainly different from anything I’ve ever written. Hunter has read it and says he thinks it will appeal to fans of Swan Song and Stinger, so that sounds good to me.

I was asked recently about how long it takes to write a book and how long it takes for the book to be published. I replied that it takes me about nine months to write the book, but it can take another year for the publisher to put it into print. They have to do the cover, the marketing plan and all that, and “fit it” into the schedule. Then something unforeseen might happen and the book might be pushed back into a later pub slot, so it can appear that “I” am not working, but believe me, I am.

I have recently been involved in a legal situation with a past publisher (not TOR, who published The Five, nor Subterranean Press). This has gone on for nine months. It’s amazing how much time something like this takes, and how much of a drain on a person’s resources—financial, time, and mental. Just when I think the situation has been resolved, something else crops up and there you go again, back in the murky soup.

Someday further down the line I may write about my experiences in the publishing business. Most of you would not believe what has happened these past twenty years. Every writer I’ve told my situation to has the same response: “That is the worst story I’ve ever heard.” Honestly, every writer says that to me. But I keep soldiering on, even though it’s been sometimes (often) very difficult. Two things actually keep me going: your readership, and the fact that I have many more books I want to read, and the only way I can read them is to write them.

The publishing business is in a strange place right now. Dealing with the people there, you get the sense that some are in shock and sleepwalking due to abrupt changes in the business, yet their egos are swollen to the extent that they can’t see the forest due to the little bitty bugs on all the leaves. I keep up pretty much with the business, and it always fascinates me to see a book promoted and touted before it’s published…and yet as soon as it hits the shelves, it disappears with no fanfare. I have gone out looking for books that received great attention before its pub date, only to find that the book is gone or that the book was never even delivered to my local Barnes & Noble. I spent a whole summer two years ago looking for a book that was supposed to be published in June and part of a “Lord Of The Rings”-type trilogy, and I found one copy of it on a remainder table in October. There were no further additions to the “series”.

More true than ever is the experience of Vernon Thaxter from Boy’s Life. If you don’t know what I mean, read that section where Vernon is explaining to Cory about writing his book Moon Town. ‘Nuff said about that.

Some other writer has said that writing is one of the most brutal professions. Well…think of it. You are on your own. Everything comes from your mind. All the experiences that you’d had through your life color your work. There is no one to help you get through a scene, or make sense of a situation, or guide the work to a successful conclusion. You are on your own, kid. Think about the day-to-day pressure of that, because not only does the work have to be “good”, it has to be “extra-special” good, yet it can’t be too off-the-wall or too “daring”. In my experience, some publishers look for your work to follow a model of success that some other writer has created. I grew up with the idea that you should push yourself to create something that hasn’t existed before, to take chances, and in that way grow as a writer.

Well, I was wrong.

Wrong not in my belief, which I still think is right, but wrong in my idea that the publishing world would rush to embrace a new and different idea. That may have been so in the 1940s and 1950s, when there were primarily literary people in charge of the publishing world…less so in the 1960s and 1970s, when more business people began to come in…less so again the following two decades, and now I find that the business people are fully in charge, the stockholders are breathing down their necks, and any decision to take a chance on a book has to go through a committee, with the punishment of losing your job if you have backed an “under-performing” book. Yet book publishers still struggle to figure out how to promote a book, and most are thrown against the wall to see what sticks. In that kind of climate, very few are successful.

(And maybe I’m talking about the first two books of the Matthew Corbett series, and maybe not.)

Of course it all comes down to individual preference and what experiences have colored the life of any individual editor. The first Harry Potter book was turned down by a ridiculously large number of publishers…and I always thought it was funny, that if you went looking for the actual people who turned down books that later became extremely popular and successful, you would wind up with a handful of air.

Generally speaking, in my experience I have found that some professional people run from responsibility, would die—or kill—rather than admit a fault, and build stone walls to keep there from being any honest or constructive conversation. A publisher can scorn you and treat you like dirt, but any attempt on your part to fix a problem, or at least come to some deeper understanding, is rejected. Truly, you are supposed to become a mute slave, keep on working, and keep on taking any indignity that is pushed upon you. Any “backtalk” resigns you to the gutter.

Why do I stay in this kitchen, if it’s so hot and miasmic?

Because, as I say, I have your readership, your appreciation, and my desire to read books that only I can write. And this is not strictly an oversized ego speaking, but the awareness that to keep going in this business, you have to believe first and foremost in yourself, that you think only you can write this, that no one else can do it better, and by writing this you will be delivering what will hopefully mean something positive to someone and maybe cool off the particularly hot kitchen they might find themselves in. So…it’s for you, and it’s for me, and who else is there?

Moving ahead.

Next up is the second part of I Travel by Night, followed by the next Matthew book. After that will be a book I’ve been wanting to do for awhile, set in New Orleans during the Great Depression. It will be different, I promise that.

Thank you for your readership, your support, and your comments. Without those, where would I be? I shudder to think.

I hope you enjoy The River of Souls, which puts Matthew in quite a few dangerous situations and one at the end that is pretty much a cliff-hanger.

And as I say…moving ahead.

Robert McCammon